red squirrels. In one apple-tree hole was a litter of six; in the butt of an oak were five with eyes unopened, and the conspicuous outside nests were many. A Barred Owl clung to the top of a white birch with one claw, and was tearing away at a squirrel’s new domed nest with the other claw. The Hawks had their nest with two young in the swamp beyond, and this grove was their handy larder, and very noisy they were over their daily grace before meat. The Buteos’ nests from which my ’82 series was taken, were for the most part old ones, the very few exceptions being smaller than those used for several seasons. The use of an old nest by the Great-horned Owl is habitual. The Barred Owl takes a hole when it can find one, and if not, an old nest. Failing there, he builds a very small nest of the flimsiest sort. To show the dislike of our Raptores to nidification, let me reproduce an avian drama to which usher nature gave me a free pass and open stall last Spring. The scene opens late in March on Plain Hill, where a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks were furbishing up the nest in which off and on they had bred for five years. Their dalliance was pleasant, no doubt, but dangerously long, for a Barred Owl slipped in and laid two eggs April 1 and 3. The Hawks were virtually indignant, and were often seen to dash down towards the nest, as if to dispossess the intruder, but they always wisely stopped a few inches above the snapping bill and mass of fluffy feathers with nine points of law in its favor. The Hawks at length went across a small swamp and re-upholstered the nest in which the Owl bred in ’81. I now took the two Owl’s eggs, supposing the clutch complete, but she then went across the swamp and laid the third egg in her old tenement. When I climbed to the second nest, with the Hawks in possession, it contained three Buteo’s eggs and one Barred Owl’s. Blowing showed that the Owl’s egg was slightly incubated, and it would have been interesting perhaps to have let nature had her course with this motley clutch. The unwearied owl now went back to the first nest and laid and hatched her second clutch of two eggs. Ovipositing after a while again becoming a necessity for the Hawks, they too repaired to the opening scene of our drama from high life, and after a few noisy demonstrations against the Owl, took up their new quarters in a tree within gunshot of the first. The nest was so small I could not believe that even our smallest Buteo (_pennsylvanicus_), could breed in it, though I saw the great female Red-shouldered come from it, and could see that it was feathered through my field glass. Climbing showed it to have a very large and bright initial egg, which was riddled with shot the next day by so-called hawk-hunters. The marauders completed the series of reprisals by carrying away my young owls.